Did you forget to pay your utility bills before you left for vacation? Are you wondering if there's enough cash in your clothing budget to cover both the designer jeans you came to the mall to buy nd the jacket you found on clearance? We spend our money on the go, and these days it's getting increasingly easy to monitor our finances on the go as well.
Most banks have smartphone apps that allow you to check your balances, transfer funds between accounts, receive e-bills, and even pay them on the go. I use the BankAmerica iOS app on my iPhone 5, which I find extremely accessible. My reading of posts on the ViPhone e-mail list tells me that the apps for Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo and most other major banks are also quite accessible using VoiceOver.
But what if you want to track checking, credit card, and savings accounts held at more than one financial institution? Maybe you'd also like to create a budget, or easily keep track of your retirement accounts, your mortgage balance, and other financial data. Happily, you don't need to bounce back and forth among multiple apps to manage this kind of financial information. In this article I will discuss Mint, Check, and MoneyWiz, three iOS apps that allow you to gather and consult the information from multiple accounts and financial institutions.
Mint by Mint.com (Intuit)
Mint provides a comprehensive summary of your financial life, everything from checking and credit card balances to the current worth of your IRA or 401(k). The app is available free for both iOS and Android, but for this review I limited my testing to the iOS version, which I ran on my iPhone 5.
The company behind Mint is Intuit, makers of both Quicken and TurboTax. Mint uses 128-bit encryption to protect your account data as it traverses the Internet, and you can also set an optional four-digit PIN that must be entered every time you open the app (even if you're opening it from the running apps list).
A Note Regarding Accessibility
I first began evaluating this app in late 2013 with version 2.7.1. The developers had implemented a number of accessibility improvements, and overall the app worked well with VoiceOver. Unfortunately, the very next version, 2.7.2, broke several of these changes. I have been assured by company representatives that they are aware of these issues and are working to remedy them. For now, I'll take them at their word. Hopefully, by the time you read this, a new and permanently improved version will be available in the App Store. In the meantime, I will be sure to note the existing problems and offer workarounds where needed.
The Mint Interface
Set up a Mint account by entering your e-mail address and password and selecting the link in the confirmation e-mail you will receive. You can then log in to your account, at which time you will be presented with an overview screen that updates your combined cash on hand and your total outstanding credit, followed by a summary of your recent earned and recent spent amounts, along with a total positive or negative dollar amount, depending on which is greater. Of course right now these numbers will all be blank.
Below this information, you will find a button to catch any alerts you may have on your accounts, and then a button for "Advice," which tends to be sales pitches for various credit cards and savings accounts. Near the bottom of the summary screen there is a pie chart that groups your recent spending by category. The chart itself is inaccessible, but the control is one-finger swipeable (up or down). Each category will be announced in turn with the total amount and percent of total spending it represents.
In order to use Mint, you will need to already have online accounts set up for the banking and financial institutions you use. To add an account, activate the "Settings" button and then the Accounts screen. You will be prompted to select one of the listed banks, or you can enter a URL, along with your login and password for the account. Mint will grab all the information available for all accounts associated with your long in credentials at a given institution. For example, when I entered my Bank of America account and log in, it grabbed the data for my two checking accounts, my savings account, and my credit card accounts.
Here is where a few of the new accessibility hurdles begin. Near the top of the main Overview screen there is a button labeled "Accounts." In the previous version, activating this button provided you with an accessible list of all of your accounts along with current balances. In version 2.7.2, the accounts are listed by highest to lowest balance, but are voiced as "Top left label," "Bottom left label," "Top right label," "Bottom right label." Hopefully this will be fixed by the time you read this, but for now, tap any of these generic labels and you will get the account name and balance, credit card available credit, and a list of transactions. If all you want to view is a quick list of all of your recent transactions, double tap the "All Accounts" button near the top of the screen. For a completely accessible list of all your accounts and balances without transactions, for now, go into the Settings menu and then invoke the "Accounts" button.
The Mint app auto-assigns categories to each transaction and in almost every case assigned the correct category. My electric bill payment was labeled Utilities, my USAA payment was labeled Insurance. The app put every Amazon purchase into the Gifts and Donations category, which wasn't accurate for all of my purchases. These types of errors are easily fixed by assigning a different category, and it's easy to split any transaction between or among multiple categories, and to assign a partial dollar amount to each.
Mint sends out a number of e-mail alerts, including upcoming bill notices for listed credit card accounts, weekly financial summaries, and large deposit and large spending alerts. These last are very handy to receive in these days of rampant cyber insecurity.
The e-mailed Weekly Financial Summary totals up your net worth, assuming you have entered all your debts and financial resources into the app. It also lists the previous week's spending by category and reviews your budget for each. The app automatically creates a budget by averaging your spending in each category over all of your spending accounts. You can change these monthly budget amounts on the company's website, Mint.com, but I found the site a bit tricky to navigate, with a number of unlabeled buttons and difficult-to-access controls.
Recommendations
Mint offers a handy one-stop review of your finances and spending habits. You can't pay bills or perform account transfers from within this app (as you can with the Check app described below), but for many security-minded individuals, this is limitation is actually a positive.
As mentioned, there are several accessibility issues using this app with VoiceOver. Considering all the improvements in the previous version, however, this seems to be a "two steps forward, one step back" situation. I do plan to keep Mint installed on my iPhone. I enjoy being able to check the balances of all of my accounts in one place.
Check from Pageonce, Inc
Check is a mobile payment system that currently processes over two million dollars in bill payments every day for ten million cstomers. The company's bill pay and personal finance management app, called simply, Check, is available free for both iOS and Android, but again I limited my testing to the iOS Version 7.0.
Like Mint, Check enables you to gather and display checking, credit card, savings, loan, and investment transactions and accounts all in one place. Unlike Mint, with Check you can also enter your various phone, utility, insurance, student loans, and other bills and receive alerts when it's time to make a payment. Alerts appear in the app's home screen. Alerts are also e-mailed to you with both the amount, date due, and account name, but not the account number.
You can pay your credit card and other bills directly from the Check app, making your payments from any of your checking, savings, or credit card accounts. You can also send cash to another person via e-mail or text message via the "Pay Anyone" feature. There is a four percent service charge for credit card payments, but all cash transactions are free. Check uses 256-bit encryption for enhanced security.
Check does not offer budgeting features, nor does it allow you to categorize or rename any transaction. For example, you cannot change the $9.99 Amazon charge to "Book," or "Business expense." You can, however, access a running accounting of all the payments you have made to your power company or other payee, even if you pay them from multiple cash or credit card accounts.
Using Check with VoiceOver
With the current version of Check, 7.0, I experienced several frustrations entering and viewing my data using VoiceOver. Installing the app and signing up for a Check account was easy. The opening screen invited me to take an app tour, which presented little accessible information. The only way I found to exit the tour was to close the app, remove it from the running apps ist, and restart it. All of the tour information is available on the company's website.
The Settings menu allows users to set an optional four-digit PIN, after which you will be asked for this PIN every time you log in to the app, even if it's still running on your apps list. The Settings menu also includes an Auto Login toggle, which is turned on by default. Turn this off if you would prefer to log in whenever you start the app. You can also add security questions and answers from inside the Settings menu, and limit access to the current device, which is handy if you have multiple iOS devices used by several family members.
Entering bank and other account information was straightforward: you enter your log-in credentials for the institution's Web site, and the app grabs your accounts and adds them to your list. Unfortunately, after verifying my account information, the app occasionally crashed and required a restart. Usually the account sync had been completed before the crash happened, but in the case of my mortgage company, authentication is followed by a security question, so when the app crashed midway through this process I had to begin again from scratch. Like Mint, Check gathered information from all of my various accounts at Bank of America automatically.
I could not find a bank or billing account that was not available for display. I was even able to find my small-town water utility bill. With this information entered, the Check home screen displayed a list of transactions, upcoming bills, the amount due, and the pay-by date. I could also add accounts I do not intend to pay via Check, or perhaps accounts I plan to pay in cash, such as the babysitter, or a child's allowance. It would be handy if there were a "Pay Now" button for these accounts so you could pay them manually, as described below.
You can use the app to pay most national bill accounts and many smaller payees. The only bill I could not pay directly through Check was that water bill, though I could get my bill amount and date due information. Each of my other accounts offered an option to pay that bill, and you can pay with any of your checking or credit card accounts.
You can also pay accounts you haven't saved in your bills list via the "Pay Any Bill" button. Select or search for your insurance, cable, merchant credit card,or other bill and you are prompted to enter either the account number or your Web log-in information. Unfortunately for me, this option consistently crashed the app. So for now, the best way to pay a bill using Check with VoiceOver is to add the account and then pay it via the account's summary page.
There is another useful option in the Pay Any Bill screen: the ability to send money to anyone via an e-mail address or a text-messaging enabled cell phone number. Enter the amount manually, add the e-mail address or cell number manually or through selecting one of your contacts. The recipient will receive a special encrypted link, where they can either add the funds to one of their Check accounts, or enter a bank account number where they wish the cash to be deposited. Unfortunately, you cannot make these payments recurring, which would have been handy if, say, you are sending a monthly allowance to a student away at college.
When the recipient enters a bank account number a Check account is automatically created. That person can then access and use the account as though they had set it up from scratch. All account holders can delete their Check account and all data anytime by either logging into the Check website and accessing the Settings link, or by calling Customer Service by tapping the "Call Support Now" button on the app's Help screen. During my evaluation I called support several times at different times of the day. In each instance my call was answered in less than a minute, and the reps were knowledgeable about the app itself, albeit not very knowledgeable about VoiceOver.
Recommendations
The Check app does an excellent job of displaying your various accounts and allowing you to view bills and transactions from a umber of different institutions in a single place. For this reason alone it's worth installing and setting up. The bill payment feature is not as useful if your bank already offers online bill payment, unless you wish to pay different bills from accounts at different banks, or if you wish to send money to friends or family members instantly via text or e-mail. Small billers can also receive their complete payment, without the service fees charged by PayPal.
Unfortunately, this app has some definite accessibility issues. Along with the occasional crashes I experienced while using VoiceOver, there are also several unlabeled buttons, such as the button that appears when you first open the app that sends you to your accounts page. I have reported these issues to the company. They assure me they are working to make their app more VoiceOver accessible. Most of the problems occurred when adding accounts. After that, the app performed much more smoothly with VoiceOver. Nonetheless, for now, if you are easily frustrated, you may wish to wait for a future app update with "Enhanced Accessibility" in the "What's New" section.
MoneyWiz from SilverWiz Ltd
Unlike Mint and Check, MoneyWiz is not a free app, though there is a full-featured light version that limits your transactions so you can "try before you buy."
MoneyWiz is available for the iPhone, iPad, and for the Mac. It will also soon be available for both Android and Windows desktops. I looked briefly at the Mac version, and it appeared to include the very same feature set as the iOS version described below.
Security and Data Sharing
Unlike Mint and Check, MoneyWiz does not have the trust and security of a large, well-established financial institution behind it. That said, the app does not directly access your bank accounts, which is a definite plus to anyone concerned about the security of their finances. You do not even need to enter an e-mail address to use MoneyWiz. By default the app does not store any of your data in the cloud. You can set up an optional SYNCbits account and store your data on the MoneyWiz servers, if you like, which allows you to share data between users or on different devices. SYNCbits is a third party app that provides data synch service, so even if you do synch your data, employees of MoneyWiz are still not privy to any of your financial information.
Importing Account Information
Since MoneyWiz does not access your bank directly, you will need to add accounts manually. You do this either by entering the information via your device's onscreen or Bluetooth keyboard, or by downloading an .OFX, .QIF, or .CSV file from your financial institution's website and then importing this data into the app. You can log in to your bank's website using your Apple device's browser and then use the "Open in" option to begin the data import. You can also choose to e-mail the file to yourself and then tap-and-hold the attachment file name until the "Share" menu pops up. I was even able to begin the import by adding a .QIF file to my Dropbox and using the Share option to "Open in" MoneyWiz.
There are several unlabeled buttons in this app. For example, when you begin an import you will be prompted to link the account in your data file on the left to the MoneyWiz accounts, found on the right. The only icons are both labeled "Forminterfacetitlebar," but like most of the unlabeled buttons in this app, it's not too difficult to figure out what each does. In this case, the first opens the left-side list, the second opens the one on the right.
Before the import proceeds, you have the chance to assign each entry to one of the budget categories, such as Groceries or Insurance. The app also checks for duplicate entries that may already be in your MoneyWiz register and offers you the option to remove thm from the import list. This is handy if your .OFX or other data file's date range overlaps your last import, or if you have already entered a transaction into the app manually.
Add transactions manually by performing a double-tap-and-hold gesture on the "Accounts" button at the bottom of the app screen. Use the "Scheduled" button to register future deposits, bills, and recurring transactions.
Budgeting and Monitoring
Invoke the "Budget" button at the bottom of the MoneyWiz home screen to create multiple budgets, one, for example, for groceries, a second for utility bills, etc. Give each budget a name, and select the category you wish to monitor from a dropdown list with unlabeled buttons beneath each category with sub listing, such as "Home" and "Car Expenses"category. Enter the amount you wish to budget for each category. You can combine more than one category in a single budget (for instance tracking gas, water, and electricity bills in the single category of Utilities).
Select a start date for your budget. If you enter a date six months in the past, MoneyWiz will begin by analyzing your spending for the past six months. Select your budget period: Are you creating a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly budget? Then instruct MoneyWiz whether or not you want unused funds to be rolled over into the next budget period.
Your budgets will now appear whenever you invoke the Budgets button. You will see how much you have in each spending category and how much you have spent thus far during the month, or another specified time period. You will also receive an alert if you go over budget.
Report Generation
You can generate a variety of accessible MoneyWiz reports, including net worth, payee, budget, and category spending, as well as a thorough statistical analysis of your earnings and spending habits over different time periods. You can view the report immediately, and save it on your device, if you like, for future reference. Most useful, however, is the ability to export these reports via e-mail using the "Save" button in your choice of either .PDF or .CSV spread sheet formats.
Recommendations
Data entry into the MoneyWiz app is cumbersome compared to Mint and Check, but if you manage your spending with a budget, MoneyWiz has a lot to offer. Likewise if you want or need to create and export reports of your on-the-go spending for taxes or business reimbursements. Security minded individuals may also appreciate the app's hands-off approach to financial data.
The MoneyWiz app has some accessibility issues, but these are almost all buttons that are unlabeled, and since the developer has already expressed interest in making the app 100% VoiceOver accessible, I am hopeful these minor glitches will be fixed soon.
Product Information
Mint (Free)
Apple App Store
Google Play Store
Check (Free)
Apple App Store
Google Play Store
Money Wiz (iOS: $4.99; Mac: $24.99)
iPhone and iPad
Mac
